Shortages of consumer goods in Stalinist regimes

The testimony of Anthony Barnett

I would like to continue examining, this time through Anthony Barnett’s testimony, the various dimensions of consumer-goods shortages, queues, and the pervasive sense of deprivation that shaped everyday life under Stalinist regimes.

Barnett, an English writer, journalist and political commentator who for many years served as editor of New Left Review, visited the Soviet Union in 1987 and recounted his observations in a book entitled Soviet Freedom [*]. Published in Turkish under the title Sovyetler’de Özgürlük [**], the book contains a wealth of striking observations and anecdotes showing just how distorted the material organisation of everyday life was under the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union.

One of Barnett’s first striking observations about Moscow was the poverty that seemed etched into the city’s human landscape:

Compared to an equivalent city in the West, Moscow is poor. In the centre, its people look and dress as they might have in a mid-western American town fifteen years ago. (…) The number of people with bad teeth is very noticeable… (p. 41)

The picture painted by Barnett reminded me of a similar assessment of the Soviet Union in the late 1960s made by Zekeriya Sertel in his book Olduğu Gibi - Rus Biçimi Sosyalizm (As It Was: Socialism in the Russian Manner) [***]:

The impression of foreign visitors was by no means favourable. Whenever we asked friends who had visited the Soviet Union what their impression was, the answer was always the same: misery. Yes, in the Soviet Union, despite all the efforts, exertions, concealment and display, this was the picture that emerged: misery. (p. 136)

There is a gap of roughly twenty years between Barnett’s observations from the late 1980s and Sertel’s from the late 1960s. It is certainly not insignificant that what struck both of them was the poverty and shabbiness etched into the outward appearance of Soviet society. During those two decades, any careful and honest observer who visited the Soviet Union and spent some time there could see that what they were witnessing was not the birth of the “new man”, but the ordinary, normalised appearance of poverty.

For example, Barnett also gives the following account in his book of the deplorable condition of village roads in the Soviet Union:

Village roads are so bad, or nonexistent, that children can’t get to school. According to the new Minister of Health, Yevgeniy Chasov: “In only 35 per cent of the rural district hospitals of the country is there a supply of hot water and in 27 per cent there is no sewerage system and in 17 per cent no running water.” (p. 46)

The observations of Feridun Gürgöz [****], a member of the historical Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) who went to Moscow in 1989 for political training, two years after Barnett, likewise confirm what was said about the condition of the villages. Gürgöz and the other TKP members who had come to study at the school were accommodated at an auxiliary campus in Pushkino, a town about thirty kilometres north of the capital, because there was no room at the main campus in Moscow. About the village situated right next to the campus, Gürgöz writes as follows:

The condition of the village was pitiful. The houses looked as though they might collapse at any moment. The animals’ sheds stood side by side with the dwellings. The roads were unpaved, and as it was winter, the mud was knee-deep. Such was the state of a village some thirty kilometres north of Moscow. (p. 130) (Also see: Feridun Gürgöz’s political memoirs (4): What the “party school” taught)

While Sertel wrote of Baku in the late 1960s that “the markets were completely empty”, Barnett stressed that in Moscow in 1987 the issue was not so much a chronic and generalised shortage of consumer goods as the difficulty of finding the particular goods one was looking for.

There is quite a lot in the shops (…) but its whereabouts and quality is unpredictable and erratic and the queues are ridiculous. “You don’t buy things in Russia”, one housewife told me angrily when I brought the conversation round to shopping, “you get them”. (pp. 41-42)

A queue for frozen fish in a Soviet food store in the 1980s.

The difference between Sertel’s and Barnett’s observations stems primarily from the particular importance attached to keeping shortages of consumer goods in Moscow to a minimum. As the country’s showpiece, Moscow enjoyed a more privileged system of supply than other cities; through an approach known as regionalism or “first-category supply”, food and consumer goods were more readily available in the capital. Yet despite this privileged position, serious difficulties in obtaining consumer goods were at times experienced even in Moscow during the 1970s and 1980s. Of course, once the country plunged headlong into the vortex of capitalist restoration in 1989 and afterwards, shortages of consumer goods would come to ravage Moscow no less than the Soviet Union as a whole.

The special meaning that a Soviet housewife attached to the verb “to get” in the context of shopping is perhaps one of the most succinct descriptions of everyday life in the Soviet Union. In a system dominated by shortages, low-use-value goods, irregular distribution and an arbitrary system of supply, the matter ceased to be one of “buying”; instead, it became a matter of watching for and seizing the rare opportunity when it presented itself. Barnett explains the special meaning attached to this verb as follows: “Getting things means seizing opportunities, playing the system, using contacts, bribery and barter, in cash, kind or in favours.” (p. 42)

There is a crucial point here. Shortage does not merely mean the absence of certain goods; it is also a phenomenon that corrodes the fabric of social relations. It turns people from citizens who meet their needs through open and orderly channels into actors who cultivate connections, watch for opportunities, hoard goods, and calculate possible exchanges. It also, of course, opens the door to bribery, corruption and every form of degeneration. In such a system, “normal” consumer behaviour gives way to a state of constant alertness. People act with an eye not only to what they may find today, but also to the possibility that tomorrow they may find nothing at all.

A vodka queue on a cold day in Chukotka, 1985.

An unforgettable scene that illustrates this perfectly is the banana queue that Barnett witnessed on Gorky Street:

Walking down Gorki Street, I noticed a line of people out in the open waiting to buy green bananas, from a woman with a white coat and a large pair of scales. At the head of the queue was a small elderly man in a battered suit. The assistant put a large bunch on the scales, then another and another. There was restlessness in the line as another large bunch went on. By now, the bananas towered above the old man’s head. Yet another bunch went onto the pile. Even if he had been starved of his greatest passion, he could never have consumed so many bananas before they went bad. He was buying for the future, for exchange with neighbours, and because he might never have another chance to get to the head of the line of people trying to buy bananas. Everyone buys today as if there will be nothing tomorrow, because all too often there isn’t any coffee/tea/lemons/toothpaste or bananas tomorrow or the day after that. It struck me as a miracle that the old man could even carry that many bananas. (p. 43)

This scene, which seems as though it has stepped straight out of a film by the great Federico Fellini, cannot simply be brushed aside as “tragicomedy”. The ridiculous figure here is not the old man. What is truly disgraceful is that, in a socio-economic order where the privileged bureaucratic caste in power claimed to have attained “mature socialism”, people were compelled to behave in this way.

[*] Anthony Barnett, Soviet Freedom: New Perspectives on Gorbachev, Hutchinson Radius, 1st edn, 1 May 1989.

[**] Anthony Barnett, Sovyetler’de Özgürlük, trans. by Dilek Hattatoğlu and Erol Özbek, İletişim Yayınları, 1st edn, Istanbul, 1988.

[***] Zekeriya Sertel, Olduğu Gibi - Rus Biçimi Sosyalizm, ed. by Mesude Gülcüoğlu, İletişim Yayınları, 1st edn, Istanbul, 1993.

[****] Feridun Gürgöz, Saat Geri Dönmüyor, Tüstav Yayınları, Istanbul, April 2007.

To be continued

The testimony of Zekeriya Sertel (2)

The testimony of Zekeriya Sertel (1)

Queue etiquette in Stalinist Albania